Jean Doré (1944-2015) R.I.P.

Jean Doré, former Montreal mayor, dead at 70
Doré served as Montreal’s mayor from 1986 to 1994

The 39th mayor of Montreal has lost his fight with pancreatic cancer.
Jean Doré was 70 years old.
The born and bred Montrealer served two terms as the city’s mayor.
“He changed completely the way Montreal was managed,” the former leader of the Bloc Québécois, Gilles Duceppe, said at a tribute to Doré held last winter.
Doré studied law at the University of Montreal. He was elected president of the university’s general students’ association in 1967 and passed the bar not long after.

In 1974, he became one of the founding members of the Montreal Citizens’ Movement (MCM) municipal party and was elected party president in 1982.
In the 1980s, Doré and the MCM symbolized a renewal in municipal politics, eventually ending the 26-year, controversial reign of Jean Drapeau’s Civic Party.
While Doré’s first mayoral bid was unsuccessful, he became opposition leader following a 1984 byelection.
After Drapeau’s resignation in 1986, the MCM won a landslide victory, taking 55 of the 58 council seats. Doré was elected mayor with 68 per cent of the vote.
City Councillor Marvin Rotrand said the Doré years were best known for the creation of a more openly democratic style of governing.
“We went from the 1950s to the 1980s overnight in Montreal,” said Rotrand earlier this year.
Under Doré’s administration, 150 kilometres of bike paths were built in the city, as were numerous parks and public beaches – including the one on Île-Notre-Dame that now bears Doré’s name.

He was at the city’s helm when a gunman opened fire at the École Polytechnique on Dec. 6, 1989, killing 14 women.
Doré, who knew one of the victims personally, called the event one of the “blackest days” in the city’s history.
Photo: Jean Doré wipes away a tear at a news conference the day after the Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989. The mayor’s babysitter was one of the victims of the mass slaying at the University of Montreal. (Shaney Komulainen /Canadian Press)

In 1990, Doré was re-elected mayor. That same year, he welcomed to Montreal Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from a South African prison.
“It was one of the greatest moments in my political life,” Doré said of the Mandela visit.

Doré was defeated by Pierre Bourque in 1994. He attempted one more return to municipal politics in 1998, running under the Équipe Montréal banner, only to lose once again to Bourque’s Vision Montreal.
He then moved into the banking sector, working as the senior director of business development for the Caisse Desjardins.

In 2014, Doré announced he was suffering from incurable pancreatic cancer.
At an event last winter marking the MCM’s 40th anniversary, at which he was the guest of honour, Doré said one of the party’s greatest achievements was uniting anglophone and francophone Montrealers under common goals.

Doré is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Mayor Denis Coderre said a public visitation for Doré will be held Saturday and Sunday at Montreal City Hall. He said there will also be a civic funeral, though no date has been announced.

(Montreal Gazette) History will be kind to Jean Doré. Friends and colleagues of the former two-term mayor of Montreal have been saying that lately after watching three full-term mayors and two interim mayors spin the revolving door at Montreal city hall since Doré’s ouster in the 1994 municipal election.
However, Doré will never see his entry in the annals of Montreal political history recast in light of the corruption scandals and stagnation that succeeded him.
Doré died of complications of pancreatic cancer on Monday. He was 70.
A form of redress had only recently begun to be paid to Doré’s achievements as mayor, with Montreal city hall’s announcement in April that it would name the public beach at Île Notre-Dame — which had been Doré’s brainchild — after him.
“As time goes on, there’ll be more recognition of that era in Montreal’s history and the foundations that were set,” said Helen Fotopulos, who served closely with Doré as a cultural policy adviser in the mayor’s office before she won a seat as a city councillor in 1994.
Doré, who learned he was terminally ill in the late summer of 2014, granted a handful of interviews to journalists in November — not to discuss his illness, but to justify his record as Montreal’s 39th mayor.
Doré lamented that his adult daughter’s generation of friends were unfamiliar with his administration’s accomplishments because they had become so ingrained that they were taken [for] granted. …

The Doré administration launched what was for its day a revolution in public participation, democratic decision-making and openness at the city, not the least of which included unlocking the bronze double front doors of city hall’s main entrance on Notre-Dame St. E., which Drapeau had ordered shut at some point during his reign. Other changes that were ushered in by Doré’s administration are now so anchored in the city’s day-to-day operations that they’re largely taken for granted.

They included the introduction of regulations to protect Mount Royal from unwanted development and an urban plan to guide development in other parts of the city, the creation of consultative committees of city council and a public-consultation office, the introduction of a question period at city council meetings where the public could enter council chambers and ask questions of the mayor and members of council, decentralization of the city into human-scale administrative districts and the opening of local Accès Montréal offices offering municipal services to residents in multiple languages.

Under the Doré administration, the city also invested massively in non-profit housing, opened the Biodôme, installed modern public art, established new regional parks and introduced clauses in municipal contracts to promote political objectives, such as requiring contractors to pledge they have no investments in the nuclear arms industry or in Apartheid in South Africa. “These were things that Jean Doré lived by,” Fotopulos said of Doré’s interest in using the city’s levers to fight against Apartheid and achieve equality in the city apparatus.
“It was a cabinet in which, I have to say, being non-racist, non-sexist and democratic was a prerequisite.
“It was no longer a one-man show. He was a team man. He was not a prima donna. He had good people around him, and he used their strengths.”
Fotopulos also says that despite Doré’s public image as a technocrat who would explain his decisions and policies in micro-detail at news conferences, he was in fact a warm and friendly person.
“We all know he can go overboard in explaining how a piece of machinery is put together,” she said. “But on a personal level, he was fun.”

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Jean Doré’s funeral to be held Monday at Montreal city hall
A civic funeral for former mayor Jean Doré will held Monday at Montreal’s city hall, with visitation services over the weekend, Mayor Denis Coderre announced Wednesday.
Saturday’s visitation will be open to family, close friends and dignitaries. Sunday’s visitation at city hall will be open to the public, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. It was Doré’s wish to have his funeral at city hall, Coderre told reporters earlier this week. It’s a rare, if not unheard of, event in the city’s history.
[Update] The civic funeral service for former Montreal mayor Jean Doré will be held on Monday, June 22 at Montreal City Hall.
At 10 a.m., a non-religious service will be held for Doré’s family, invited friends and dignitaries.

Montreal firefighters to clean up trucks for Jean Doré’s funeral
Firefighters will peel stickers off trucks, wear dress uniforms as tribute to former mayor
In a statement released Friday, the union says firefighters will peel off the stickers that have been plastered on their trucks for months before Monday.
Firefighters in dress uniform will form honour guards at City Hall for people attending the public visitation this weekend to pay tribute to Doré, as well as at his funeral Monday.
“His ability to listen, his engagement and the confidence that the ex-mayor Doré invested in firefighters more than justifies that we pay him this homage,” said Ronald Martin, president of the firefighters union, in the statement.